Casual
DICARLO, RACHEL
Casual DESERT WARRIORS Three weeks ago, Mike came home. He's the brother I wrote about on this page after he'd finished Marine boot camp and shipped out to the Persian Gulf as a helicopter...
...Hundreds of people were already at Hangar 4 when we arrived...
...After the Americans captured Jalibah airfield, in southern Iraq, Mike's squadron relocated to the desert...
...and scattered in a rush to find their families...
...We all squinted straight ahead into the sun, expecting the helicopters to fly in over the Sierra Madre mountains...
...Young women in dressy skirts and high heels waited at the front of the hangar holding teddy bears and flowers...
...Only then did Mike open up...
...The camel spider dispatched a week's worth of scorpions, so they put it up against a foot-long gila monster, which it managed to cow but not kill...
...Then the pilots got the command to cut their engines...
...Huge speakers blared George Thoro-good & the Destroyers's "Bad to the Bone" as the choppers flew past the hangar, circled, landed, and then taxied into rows of five...
...RACHEL DICARLO...
...The match turned into a tournament...
...Every night after dinner they'd put the spider and its latest challenger in an empty MRE box and wait for one of them to attack...
...The local Navy League was handing out posterboard, wooden props, and markers, and kids were sprawled on the floor writing messages like "Welcome Home Daddy" and "Your Princess Missed You...
...One by one, the troops began to emerge from the backs of the helicopters and make their way down ramps to the ground...
...For most of the war, he worked 16-hour days on the flight deck of the Boxer, running to work on the helicopters as soon as they landed...
...But right on schedule, a thunderous roar rose behind us, and over the hangar 15 green, tractor-trailer sized CH-53 helicopters appeared in formations of five...
...We sat on a patio with a view of the mountains...
...When the command dismissing them finally came, they yelled in unison, "Ooh-rah...
...Usually, Mike said, they just stared at each other, and he had to shake the box to get them to fight...
...Amused by its feistiness, Mike and his friends decided to stage a death match between the spider and a scorpion...
...When our drinks arrived, we raised a glass to Mike and all the other troops, hoping that each of them would make it back safely and enjoy a homecoming as happy as ours...
...One day he noticed, making its way through the sand, an enormous insect that he said looked like a brown, upside-down praying mantis with sacs all over its body...
...She carded Mike, and when he produced his military ID showing he was two months shy of 21, she looked at it, nodded, and went to get the drinks...
...But there were fighter planes taking off in the distance...
...It took us a little while to single out Mike in the sea of Marines, all dressed in their beige desert uniforms and boonie hats...
...He's the brother I wrote about on this page after he'd finished Marine boot camp and shipped out to the Persian Gulf as a helicopter mechanic aboard the USS Boxer...
...There they had a lot of free time and not much entertainment...
...The streets near the base are lined with palm trees and were packed with Marines cruising around in jeep convertibles, so the place had the feel of a Southern California college town...
...We recognized him from behind...
...Eventually, they got bored with the game, and let the undefeated champion go...
...The whole family flew to Miramar, the Marine Corps air station in San Diego, to welcome him...
...But we saw him before he saw us...
...From our place at the front of the crowd, we looked over a vast expanse of concrete known as the flightline...
...It immediately recovered and charged back at him, and even tried to climb up his boot...
...Overwhelmed by the moment, he could only tell us over and over how good it felt to be home...
...The stories started tumbling out...
...My father told the waitress, "This man just got back from Iraq, and he would like an ice-cold beer...
...The giant, noisy rotors kept on spinning for a few minutes, producing the gusts of wind the mechanics call rotor wash...
...Mike had lost weight in the desert heat, so we took him to a Mexican restaurant in a mission-style strip mall to get a fattening lunch...
...By this time the music was "Proud To Be An American...
...He and his buddies were choppered off the ship to keep their arrival separate from the Navy sailors...
...The critter—a camel spider, he learned— crawled near his gear, and to get rid of it he flicked it away with his foot...
...A girl Marine with a 12-gauge shotgun slung over her shoulder demanded our identification at the base's north gate...
...They marched into the center of the flightline and stood in formation to be greeted by their commanding officer...
Vol. 8 • August 2003 • No. 47
